South Africa's last state president under apartheid, F.W. de Klerk, had a tragic lack of insight into the evil of South Africa's racial segregation policy, the Anglican Bishop of Grahamstown, David Russell, said last week, 19 June.

Bishop Russell was addressing the media after an hour-long meeting with Mr. F.W. de Klerk, the leader of the National Party, which ruled South Africa from 1948 until President Nelson Mandela's non-racial government took over in 1994.

The private meeting took place in Mr. De Klerk's Cape Town office after the bishop published an open letter in a provincial newspaper, the Daily Dispatch, challenging him to a public debate after the National Party denied knowledge of human rights abuses under apartheid.

Mr. De Klerk appeared to be in a "profound condition of denial" and continued to present the original motivation for apartheid as something morally acceptable and justifiable at the time, Bishop Russell told reporters. "I said I think the motivation was essentially wicked. It was white greed. It was a determination to hold on to power violently in the interests of a minority, and that needs to be admitted and said in an unequivocal way.

"Perhaps that's hoping for a miracle. I went [to the meeting] hoping for a miracle, a conversion. It didn't happen. I was really appalled at Mr. De Klerk's lack of insight into what apartheid did to people."

In his open letter to the former state president, the bishop wrote that it seemed "that you truly need help in understanding the meaning of the phrase 'gross abuse and violation of human rights' ... committed by the party in which you played a central part for so long".

The bishop also wrote: "I have experience in my ministry which will really acknowledge and recognise the manifest guilt of your party concerning the gross violation of human rights and the cruel abuse of countless numbers of people."

As a young priest in the 1970s, David Russell made headlines as a prominent anti-apartheid activist, long before the churches spoke out strongly against the apartheid state. He gained world prominence for lying down in front of bulldozers to protest against forced removals of people of colour from areas declared "whites only". He was forcibly dragged away by police.

Article by: Noel Bruyns, ENI